Spelling Smeagol as Sméagol
Is a matter of correctness.
Smeagol himself
couldn't care less.
He just wants his precious back.

Those who hunt him
Tend to hate it.
For it makes him hard to spot
In the message log,
Where the shadows are.
But where 's'earching = still léagol.

Thank you for enduring my poetry.My question: Is there an easy way to look up names with accents (such as Sméagol) in the message log?
When editing monster.txt (with ViM), I use "/Sm..agol", but that doesn't work inside angband. To find Sméagol, entering "=agol" works, but I hope for something that works for other names with accents too. Such as "Nár".

I'd love it if we had a runtime switch to turn UTF-8 off and lose all accents. It does cause the searching issue that you raise. It also results in non-ASCII character dumps, which look like garbage if you try to view them in an xterm.